A Selection of Odd Webpages

December 5, 2017

A small update today. It seems that an official listing for the first Sims game has cropped up on ea.com. The page even holds a detailed description of the game as well as a header image: a render that seems to be an amalgamation of old expansion pack renders.

Could this prelude to an Origin re-release of The Sims? EA has already removed superfluous DRM from an unlisted Sims 2 collection on Origin, in the process making it more compatible with modern versions of Windows. As of current, the only way to obtain legal copies of the Sims 1 and 2 is to find out of production physical discs and I’m happy about the possibility of a re-release.

Sites like GOG do good work in making old games available and I’m even fairly happy with EA having made some of their old old games available on Origin. Even games with still-active fanbases eventually stop being able to keep distributing abandonware. Sites that host downloads eventually go offline when their owners lose interest a decade later. Seeders slowly dry up, leaving only abandoned torrent files as artifacts.

I hope this page is a sign of things to come.

In other news pertaining to The Sims and platform webpages, here’s something… weird. The Microsoft store page for the Xbox One port of The Sims 4 lists as features things that… well aren’t actually real. There’s a small reference to becoming a llama rancher, which is not a thing in any current version of The Sims 4. Maybe it’s a reference to one of the Sims 4 announcement teasers?

The more interesting thing is this section of the page.

Absolutely none of this is something one can currently do with The Sims 4. Especially in a console port which doesn’t support modding.

A method to edit and create new neighborhoods is notably absent from The Sims 4. Even the proposition of populating worlds with only the kind of Sims you’d like is laid low by the fact that the game will automatically generate townies to fulfill NPC roles.

Could this be an accidental reference to some hitherto unannounced Create a World tool? Knowing how Sims 4 worlds are constructed, would something like that even be possible with a console’s control scheme?

It would be nice, and it’s a possibility I’d like to optimistically consider, but the entire page doesn’t read anything like other product pages for The Sims 4. The PC product page, definitely written by someone at EA, doesn’t much get into specific experiences, preferring to rely on taglines, notably “Play With Life”. The PlayStation page for the game echoes the EA page almost exactly.

The Xbox page seems to have been written by someone else entirely, someone who might have let slip something that they weren’t yet supposed to. Or, more likely, someone who didn’t really know what they were talking about. Whatever the case, the Xbox page is both bizarre and interesting.

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